you should probably have a kid

a letter to a friend

Dear S,

Last year you asked me for my best reason why you should have a kid. I gave you the answer that was true for me at the time, even though I knew it would be unpersuasive. I said that it was the right thing to do for the continued flourishing of humanity. A way of passing the torch as our ancestors did for us, in an line unbroken from some unknown Adam and mitochondrial Eve.

But my daughter is turning two and I have a new answer for you: there is nothing in the world that feels like this. I am so proud of her for no reason at all. She’s not a exceptional child in any way, at least not yet. She’s a little slow in learning to speak. She’s on the tall side, not breaking any records or anything, but if I ever walk her down the aisle she’ll probably be taller than me. She loves fidgeting, especially with buckles. She’s absurdly shy, so there are only maybe six or seven people in the world who have seen her toddling at full speed, smiling, laughing. She clams up around anyone else and gives them this suspicious side-eye. Her laugh would melt your heart though. There’s nothing in the world like it.

That’s not quite right, of course. Her laugh melts my heart, but it only works on me. That’s the way it works — your kids, your heart. I knew that my first argument would leave you unmoved because you see life as a collection of experiences to be sampled, not as an obligation to be discharged. I want to tell you now, this truly cannot be missed. There is nothing in the world like your own children, and I think there is no other way to experience this. I’m not an exceptionally happy person, but I feel so good every morning when she runs into our room and every evening when I put her to bed. I make some faces at her and do a little peekaboo behind the bed and she screams and runs over as fast as she can. I hug my wife and I think, look at this wonderful creature we get to raise. I can’t stop smiling. Every morning, every evening. For now.

Only for now, because nothing has made me so aware of the passage of time as having a baby. Last year was less enjoyable, caring for our weird little alien, who had all the reciprocity of a meatloaf and the communication skills (as it's been said before) of an alarm clock. Year one was just a sacrifice for me basically, and I got emotionally invested in our baby pretty much just through the sheer amount of work we put into keeping her alive. But here we are, suddenly – she's almost up to my hip, and she can open cabinets and climb onto chairs, drag us around by our fingers or escape out the front door if we forgot to lock it. She was just a tiny bundle of instincts before, but the full light of consciousness is really truly dawning in her now, her eyes bright like my wife's and her lashes long and black like mine, her giggle and smile all her own. Soon this year will be past too and it will never return. By next year I'll have a completely different answer to your question again.

Yes, there are tough moments between morning and evening (and even worse ones between evening and morning, though they’re now thankfully rare). She seems to become less reasonable as she gets older. She cried for oranges yesterday but won’t look at them today, wanted oatmeal every morning last year but wouldn’t take even a bite of it this week. Your kids get direct hardwired access to your brain stem, the part that instantly spikes your heart rate and crunches your shoulders up to your ears, and they aren’t shy about using it. But that’s what you’ve been training for all this time, right? To manage your own emotions and subjectivity, so that you can help them handle theirs. 

Those are the stressful moments, and in between there are many boring ones too. You do a few things over and over again: change diaper, feed, read the same book, pat her to sleep. You learn what each different type of high-pitched crying means. You wipe poop and milk out of bodily crevices that you never really knew existed before. But there is so much else in each of those repetitions if you can just bring it into focus, relax into it a little. You’d be good at that, I think.

You know that thing that David Foster Wallace said, how when you’re stuck in traffic or in line at the supermarket, you can choose to be bored and pissed off, or you can choose the other thing? “It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.” 

It's kind of a stretch in the checkout aisle, right? But it is not any kind of stretch at all when you are rocking your baby to sleep in the middle of the night, or reading her the same book for the fifth time in a row. There is boredom and tiredness and stress on the surface, but the mystical oneness of all things is not deep down. It is barely a centimeter underneath. It is right behind your baby’s eyes, right on the top of her absurdly soft skin. It is overwhelming and aching and beautiful. There is nothing else like it. If you don’t try you will never know.

I know there’s so much that you want to do. But I really hope you get to do this too.

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Thanks to my friends Val and Emmy for their feedback on this post.